Mastodon, an alternative social network to Twitter, has a serious problem with child sexual abuse material according to researchers from Stanford University. In just two days, researchers found over 100 instances of known CSAM across over 325,000 posts on Mastodon. The researchers found hundreds of posts containing CSAM related hashtags and links pointing to CSAM trading and grooming of minors. One Mastodon server was even taken down for a period of time due to CSAM being posted. The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
While the study itself is a good read and I agree with the conclusions—Mastodon, and decentralized social media need better moderation tools—it’s hard to not read the Verge headline as misleading. One of the study authors gives more context here https://hachyderm.io/@det/110769470058276368. Basically most of the hits came from a large Japanese instance that no one federates with; the author even calls out that the blunt instrument most Mastodon admins use is to blanket defederate with instances hosted in Japan due to their more lax (than the US) laws around CSAM. But the headline seems to imply that there’s a giant seedy underbelly to places like mastodon.social[1] that are rife with abuse material. I suppose that’s a marketing problem of federated software in general.
- There is a seedy underbelly of mainstream Mastodon instances, but it’s mostly people telling you how you’re supposed to use Mastodon if you previously used Twitter.
In my opinion the biggest issue the author points out is that cached materials are sometimes retained even after moderator action. Which honestly just sounds like a straight up bug more than anything. Though if I were running an instance, the feds showing up at my door with a warrant because I’ve been accidentally distributing CSAM would be my nightmare scenario. And of course jurisdiction plays a part, too: an American user on a Canadian server might see drawn depictions of sexualized minors, think “weird but not illegal,” and now the Canadian admin has content that’s illegal in Canada on their Canadian server and has no idea.
IMO I think the best solution to this is something similar to what Renaud Chaput (Mastodon’s resident infra boffin) described in his recent blog post. Effectively, give admins a way to hand this off to pluggable third-party services. Admins that are worried about this sort of thing can then have some degree of safety via e.g. PhotoDNA, whereas others can take on additional risk and preserve additional privacy.
All that said: yeah the headline makes it sound like .social is some 8chan-esque hellhole, whereas in reality my feed is 99% German programmers sharing milquetoast political takes.
deleted by creator
While I agree that CSAM material needs to be addressed it’s also worth pointing out that cloudflare has some privacy issues.
The person outright rejects defederation as a solution when it IS the solution, if an instance is in favor of this kind of thing you don’t want to federate with them, period.
I also find worrying the amount of calls for a “Fediverse police” in that thread, scanning every image that gets uploaded to your instance with a 3rd party tool is an issue too, on one side you definitely don’t want this kinda shit to even touch your servers and on the other you don’t want anybody dictating that, say, anti-union or similar memes are marked, denounced and the person who made them marked, targeted and receiving a nice Pinkerton visit.
This is a complicated problem.
Edit: I see somebody suggested checking the observations against the common and well used Mastodon blocklists, to see if the shit is contained on defederated instances, and the author said this was something they wanted to check, so i hope there’s a followup
The person outright rejects defederation as a solution when it IS the solution
It’s the solution in the sense that it removes it from view of users of the mainstream instances. It is not a solution to the overall problem of CSAM and the child abuse that creates such material. There is an argument to be made that is the only responsibility of instance admins, and that past that is the responsibility of law enforcement. This is sensible, but it invites law enforcement to start overtly trawling the Fediverse for offending content, and create an uncomfortable situation for admins and users, as they will go after admins who simply do not have the tools to effectively monitor for CSAM.
Defederation also obviously does not prevent users of the instance from posting CSAM. Admins even unknowingly having CSAM on their instance can easily lead to the admins being prosecuted and the instance taken down. Section 230 does not apply to material illegal on a federal level, and SESTA requires removal of material that violates even state level sex trafficking laws.
Yeah I recall that the Japanese instances have a big problem with that shit. As for the rest of us, Facebook actually open sourced some efficient hashing algorithms for use for dealing with CSAM; Fediverse platforms could implement these, which would just leave the issue of getting an image hash database to check against. All the big platforms could probably chip in to get access to one of those private databases and then release a public service for use with the ecosystem.
That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.
We’re not gonna fix society using tech unless we’re all hooked up to some all knowing AI under government control.
That’d be useless though, because first, it’d probably opt-in via configuration settings and even if it wasn’t, people would just fork and modify the code base or simply switch to another ActivityPub implementation.
No it wouldn’t, because it’d still be significantly easier for instances to deal with CSAM content with this functionality built into the platforms. And I highly doubt there’s going to be a mass migration from any Fediverse platform that implements such a feature (though honestly I’d be down to defederate with any instance that takes serious issue with this).
And the instances who want to engage with that material would all opt for the fork and be done with it. That’s all I meant.
Right, and the rest of us would be able to more effectively filter it out from our instances.
Of course, I didn’t say that though.
Facebook actually being good for once? Unheard of
They actually contribute a lot of useful stuff to the web dev world, like React.js. It’s just all the other shit they do that’s awful.
Pedos that got banned from platforms turn to other platform who hasnt done it yet
In other news: the sky is blue
While white knights propose ways to control everyone everywhere everytime, in the name of catching the pedos who will just hop to the next platform (or have already).
I’m not fully sure about the logic and perhaps hinted conclusions here. The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems (so maybe we shouldn’t use it?).
It doesn’t help to bring whataboutism into this discussion. This is a known problem with the open nature of federation. So is bigotry and hate speech. To address these problems, it’s important to first acknowledge that they exist.
Also, since fed is still in the early stages, now is the time to experiment with mechanisms to control them. Saying that the problem is innate to networks is only sweeping it under the rug. At some point there will be a watershed event that’ll force these conversations anyway.
The challenge is in moderating such content without being ham-fisted. I must admit I have absolutely no idea how, this is just my read of the situation.
Maybe my comment wasn’t clear or you misread it. It wasn’t meant to be sarcastic. Obviously there’s a problem and we want (not just need) to do something about it. But it’s also important to be careful about how the problem is presented - and manipulated - and about how fingers are pointed. One can’t point a finger at “Mastodon” the same way one could point it at “Twitter”. Doing so has some similarities to pointing a finger at the http protocol.
Edit: see for instance the comment by @while1malloc0@beehaw.org to this post.
Understood, thanks. Yes I did misread it as sarcasm. Thanks for clearing that up :)
However I disagree with @shiri@foggyminds.com in that Lemmy, and the Fediverse, are interfaced with as monolithic entities. Not just by people from the outside, but even by its own users. There are people here saying how they love the community on Lemmy for example. It’s just the way people group things, and no amount of technical explanation will prevent this semantic grouping.
For example, the person who was arrested for CSAM recently was running a Tor exit node, but that didn’t help his case. As shiri pointed out, defederation works for black-and-white cases. But what about in cases like disagreement, where things are a bit more gray? Like hard political viewpoints? We’ve already seen the open internet devolve into bubbles with no productive discourse. Federation has a unique opportunity to solve that problem starting from scratch, and learning from previous mistakes. Defed is not the solution, it isn’t granular enough for one.
Another problem defederation is that it is after-the-fact and depends on moderators and admins. There will inevitably be a backlog (pointed out in the article). With enough community reports, could there be a holding-cell style mechanism in federated networks? I think there is space to explore this deeper, and the study does the useful job of pointing out liabilities in the current state-of-the-art.
I share and promote this attitude. If I must be honest it feels a little hopeless: it seems that since the 1970s or 1980s humanity has been going down the drain. I fear “fediverse wars”. It’s 2023 and we basically have a World War III going on, illiteracy and misinformation steadily increase, corporations play the role of governments, science and scientific truth have become anti-Galilean based on “authorities” and majority votes, and natural stupidity is used to train artificial intelligence. I just feel sad.
But I don’t mean to be defeatist. No matter the chances we can fight for what’s right.
This is exactly what I thought. The story here is that the human race has a massive child abuse material problem.
The problem is even bigger: some places (ejem Reddit) you will get deplatformed for explaining and documenting why there is a problem.
(even here, I’ll censor myself, and hopefully restrict to content not too hard to moderate)
The internet itself is a network with major CSAM problems
Is it, though?
Over the last year, I’ve seen several reports on TV of IRL group abuse of children, by other children… which left everyone scratching their heads as to what to do since none of the perpetrators are legally imputable.
During that same time, I’ve seen exactly 0 (zero) instances of CSAM on the Internet.
Sounds to me like IRL has a major CSAM, and general sex abuse, problem.
So instances that are actually supporting CSAM material can and should be dealt with by law enforcement. That much is simple (and I’m surprised it hasn’t been done with certain … instances, to be honest). But I think the apparently less clearly solved issues have known and working solutions that apply to other parts of the web as well. No content moderation is perfect, but in general, if admins are acting in good faith, I don’t think there should be too much of a problem:
- For when federation inadvertently spreads some of the material through to other instances’ databases: Isn’t this the same situation as when ISP’s used to cache web traffic to save on bandwidth costs? In that situation, too, browsed web pages would end up in the ISP’s cache which could then harbour whatever material the user was looking at. As I recall, the ISP would just ban CSAM and other illegal material in their terms of service, and remove anyone reported as violating the rule, and that sufficed.
- As for “bad” instances/users: It’s impossible to block all instances and all users that might disseminate this material as you’d have to go to a “block everything, then allow known entities” rule which would break the Fediverse model. Again, users or site admins found to be acting in bad faith should be blocked and reported (either automatically or manually). Some may slip through the net, but as long as admins are seen to be doing the best they can, that should be enough.
There seem to be concerns about “surveillance” of material on Mastodon, which strikes me as a bit odd. Mastodon isn’t a private platform. People who want private messaging should use an E2EE messaging app like Signal, not a social networking platform like Mastodon (or Twitter, Threads etc.). Mastodon data is already public and is likely already being surveilled, and will be so regardless of what anyone involved with the network wants, because there’s no access control on it anyway. Having Mastodon itself contain code to keep the network clean, even if it only applies to part of the network, just allows those Mastodon admins who are running that part of the code to take some of the responsibility on themselves for doing so, reducing the temptation for third parties to do it for them.
“massive child abuse material problem”
“112 instances of known CSAM across 325,000 posts”
While any instance is unacceptable, does 112/325,000 constitute a “massive problem”?
0.0000034462% of posts are unacceptable! Massive problem!
I for one am all for instances being forcibly taken down by police if they can’t moderate CSAM appropriately.
Moderation is a very real challenge. The internet at large aimed to solved it by centralizing everything to a few mega corps with AI moderation. The fediverse aims to solve it by keeping instances small and holding both mods and users accountable.
The researchers suggest that decentralized networks like Mastodon need to implement more robust moderation tools and reporting mechanisms to address the prevalence of CSAM.
I agree, but who’s going to pay for it? Those aren’t just freely available additions to any application that you only need to toggle on.
I agree, but who’s going to pay for it?
How about police/the tax payer?
If university researchers can find the stuff, then police can find it too. There should be an established way to flag the user (or even the entire instance) so that content can be removed from the fediverse while simultaneously asking for all data that is available to try to catch the criminals.
And of course, if regular users come across anything illegal they will report it too, and it should be removed quickly (I’d hope immediately in many cases, especially if the post was by a brand new/untrusted account).
One way to do this is to block hashes. This is a slippery slope though because it could be used maliciously. Only way to do this and protect freedom of information is to make this fully open source.
Image hashes? That could work. It could be a simple system like uBlock where you import filter lists to your instance and they’re easy to disable if their caretakers fill them with garbage data.
The researchers can’t be taken seriously if they don’t acknowledge that you can’t force free software to do something you don’t want it to.
Even if we started way down at the stack and we added a CSAM hash scanner to the Linux kernel, people would just fork the kernel and use their own build without it.
Same goes for nginx or any other web server or web proxy. Same goes for Tor. Same goes for Mastodon or any other Fedi/ActivityPub implementation.
It. Does. Not*. Work.
* Please, prove me wrong, I’m not all knowing, but short of total surveillance, I see no technical solution to this.
Is there any way mastodon stands out from other self hosted websites? Would the CSAM material be harder to distribute or easier to prosecute if they ran, say, a self-hosted bulletin board for it instead?
Probably just the ease at which you can find it since each instance is linked, it basically becomes a search engine that might not have the same controls/protection as Google etc
Hi, since Mastodon is no longer acceptable due to the 0.04 percent of instances found to have abusive material, would someone please suggest the alternative social network with 0 percent of these incidents? Companies like Facebook and Twitter are driven by shareholders and greed, Mastodon is a community effort and you’ll certainly find bad actors there, but I feel less dirty contributing to a community project, versus helping billionaires like Zuck and Elon line their pockets harvesting my data.
Mastodon.art doesn’t.
And the beauty of Mastodon is you can block an entire instance, as can your admin, when something awful is posted. Mastodon even has a hashtag they use as an alert for this kind of thing. (#Fediblock)
not surprised at all. this is a growing pain here too because this was previously a thing handled invisibly by platforms and federation makes it fall to individual sysadmins and whoever they have on staff. the tools for this stuff are, in general, not here yet–and as people have noted there are potential conflicts with some of the principles of federation introduced by those tools that can’t be totally handwaved.
I don’t trust stanford to not work on behalf of the CIA or other 3 alphabet orgs. They kind of turn a blind eye to CSA in churches but a federated media? This sounds like a smear job.
I really don’t think the CIA cares to be honest…
Removed by mod
This is a whataboutist counterpoint at best. Universities and their researchers are not a monolith.
OP unironically linked an article referring to a 50k donation in 2004 to a physics department to show that the Stanford Cyber Policy center somehow is not out for wellbeing of kids? Imagine being this delusional.
Aha. From this context, I surmise that this must have been a comment on a donation from Epstein.
This is just bad press. The actual study is quite good and offers good recommendations on how to improve moderation on the fediverse
I think some of the problematic instances have been defederated, IIRC there’s a large japanese instance that was defederated long time ago due to child abuse content. But still since I’ve been seeing increases of hate speech and dog whistling misogyny and homophobia in some instances, I won’t be surprised if CSAM stuff has been trading under our noses.
The main issue is that, with so many users nowadays and small moderation teams, especially in the larger instances, it’s hard to moderate and tackle CSAM problems effectively. I really wish larger instances would limit user registrations or start splitting off into smaller manageable ones.
Also, since they are trading using certain hashtags, blocking those hashtags might not be a bad idea.
